Whispers of Mystery

Whispers of Mystery
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Sunday, October 17, 2021

Jasmine's Journal: Our Completion Within

Dear readers, if you are new to “Just like Eve,” the fictional book I began in 2017, click here for an overview.

June 4, 2012, Jasmine’s home in Colorado Springs, CO

      Tim’s not at ease with my questions, Jasmine writes into her journal.  

Last night, I admitted that I gave Joshua an “F” for committing genocide, and Tim looked at me with eyes that said, “Who are you?  Do I know you?”  I’m not sure he really does.  I haven’t let him know me because I was too busy trying to find “completion” with him.  But something struck me today: I am complete when I am me!

          Jasmine pulls up her pencil and pauses over her revelation.  She makes a vow, prays it, and records it into her journal: 

No more faking the true me.  Help me, Spirit, become complete by being my true self.

          She pauses again and reflects on the difference between how she feels about Davie and how she feels about the man she married, Tim.  Since she has been musing over the concept that perhaps the second curse to Eve – “you will desire your man” – was a curse because the woman feels that she needs to be “completed” by the man, Jasmine now considers something new

It’s neither Tim nor Davie who completes me.  Davie helps me be complete, but only because he lets me be me.  Actually, it’s me completing myself by finding myself.

          Jasmine lifts her pencil up to her mouth like a finger that says “shhhh.”  Something mysterious is brewing within her that knows this revelation changes everything.  She does not need a man to be complete.  She just needs one who lets her be herself.  First, of course, she needs to find herself, and this task appears to be baffling in its complexity, seeming to call for the removal of layer upon layer upon layer of conditioning.  She had been conditioned by her parents, her church, her teachers, her community, and seemingly everyone to think in a certain way, and when she thought differently, she was mocked and sometimes even scorned for “thinking at odds.”  Eventually, to make her life easier, Jasmine permitted the conditioning of everyone else’s thinking to permeate into her.  Without even realizing what was happening to her, she became a person she didn’t recognize anymore.  Nor even like.

A whisper comes to her: Remember what Gabbie said?   The film strip of her conversation with her friends at The Alley begins to roll, and she prays for help to remember.  Bit by bit, enough returns.  She recalls Gabbie saying we each carry within ourselves a feminine principle and a masculine principle within, and some spiritual traditions teach that the masculine principle is dead without the feminine principle, and the feminine principle can’t act without the masculine principle.  Gabbie’s summary now comes back: “our inner feminine and our inner masculine need to harmonize themselves with each other.  Unless both our inner masculine and our inner feminine are alive and well, we’re stuck.”

It’s not about human people who might have lived named Adam and Eve, Jasmine records into her journal.  It’s about finding wholeness within.  We discover ourselves complete when our masculine and feminine parts come together.

With this new insight, Jasmine is eager to re-read the text of Adam and Eve.  Will it shed any further light?  Remarkably, it does.  The story carries a theme of unity and separation.  Adam was one being, but he was formed from two parts: dust of the earth (his fleshly nature) and the breath of God (his spiritual nature), suggesting a duality and a separation.  Then a rib is removed from him to create Eve, and they become two beings.  But they still have unity: they are walking in Eden together with the Creator, united with this divine force.  Later, they eat from a tree called “knowledge of good and evil.”  Duality: “good” and “evil,” or forces that are separate.  Upon these forces, now separate, the man and the woman also find themselves separate from one other.  Or, at least, they see themselves that way, as “their eyes were opened.” Upon seeing differently, one of them blames the other: “She made me do it.”  Again, they see and feel as if they are separate.  Finally, they are sent from Eden and find themselves separate from this Creator.  The story begins with unity and ends with separation.  

But are they really separate? Jasmine wonders.  Is it simply that they see differently and think they are separate when they really aren’t?

Jasmine is beginning to land upon a concept that mystics throughout the ages have called “the illusion of separation.”  We really aren’t separate, but we think we are, and discovering our unity is part of what this life on Earth is designed to teach us.

Could it be, Jasmine wonders, that this experience of completion, of unity within, is what Jesus calls the kingdom of heaven?  Jesus makes this entrance sound so simple: we just need to become like little children.  Of course, he also adds in mysterious remarks, like telling us to make our eye single.  Peter is blunt, calling entrance into the kingdom a “fiery trial,” and Luke says it comes only by way of “many tribulations.”

Ironically, one of Jasmine’s tribulations is that the closer she feels she’s coming to a single eye, the more she confuses and upsets the man she made a life-long vow to.  Is that vow one of the layers of conditioning she needs to peel off?  She shudders at that notion.  That would make for a harrowing double tribulation of both her marital trial and the trial of shifting away from one of the most powerful forms of conditioning her culture enforces.  Both of these trials terrify her.  Yet another would be even worse: cutting off the process that has begun in her to become her true self.  She has begun to find herself irritated by her former self, the one who had adopted the thinking of other people who had told her what to think and how to think.  The only person within her that she can truly love is the authentic, complete one, the one who is finding truth and unity within herself.

When she met Davie, he let her think for herself, and some of the layers of conditioning began to come off.  For the first time since she was eleven, Jasmine has begun to discover her true self.  She marvels that she is also discovering the very completion she had been seeking, and thought she had needed from a man.  Perhaps she has begun to glimpse into the kingdom of heaven.

Jasmine’s mind is spinning so fast she’s stuck on what to write next into her journal.  But she closes with a question she had never anticipated: 

Could some of the tribulations into the entrance of the kingdom involve not only thinking, but even living, quite different than what is taught by the very churches who follow the teacher who pointed the way into the kingdom?

© 2021 by karina.  All rights reserved.  Please use with permission and/or a link to this blog post.

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